Public relations agencies have well-known industry tools they rarely share with their clients: expert sourcing platforms like Qwoted and HARO. In the world of journalism, media, and content marketing, credible and expert sources are the backbone of any great story. For small businesses, developing a solid media presence enhances credibility and broadens the potential customer reach. Communications professionals who aren’t familiar with Qwoted and HARO are missing out on the invaluable ways these platforms can get their company’s leadership more exposure—as well as securing valuable website backlinks.
Comparing Qwoted and HARO for small business communications pros
In this blog, we’ll explore the features, benefits, and potential drawbacks of Qwoted and HARO, to help you make an informed decision when choosing between handling your PR internally or outsourcing to an agency.
Click here for Qwoted vs. Source of Sources.
What are Qwoted and Haro?
Qwoted and HARO, short for Help a Reporter Out, are platforms that connect journalists with industry experts, ensuring resulting publications are trustworthy, engaging, and insightful. They provide a way for media professionals to quickly find the best expert for their story, as well as businesses looking to amplify their visibility (and potentially earn coveted “dofollow” backlinks from media outlets).
Qwoted’s features and benefits
Started by PR industry professionals in 2019, Qwoted aims to democratize PR and create a thriving network of media members, PR reps, and small businesses.
Qwoted’s key features and benefits for businesses include:
- Quality Sources: Qwoted prides itself on providing journalists with top-notch sources who are experts in their respective fields. With a deep focus on business, finance, and technology, many of the hundreds of daily requests come from relevant top-tier media outlets. Qwoted is known for verifying its experts and sources and encourages its community to report spammy and irrelevant pitches—which keeps quote quality high and is one of the features journalists appreciate the most.
- Ease of Use: It’s easy to add sources to your user profile so communications professionals can quickly sign up, add their company’s leadership, and start pitching within the hour.
- Dashboard: Upon logging into Qwoted, you’ll see a dashboard with your sources, reporters you’ve communicated with, current pitched opportunities, and a stats bar. (Some features may vary depending on your subscription plan .)
- Opportunities: Also called “source requests.” Qwoted shares these in a searchable, easily skimmable grid that shows:
- The outlet logo
- The type of request
- Details about the request
- The number of pitches already submitted (available to paid users).
- Custom Matches: Qwoted offers customized expert matches based on the topics you assign to each of your sources. These matches are emailed to you as the requests come in.
- Time Efficiency: Whether you prefer to read the daily roundup of all the new opportunities, respond to topical alerts, or scan the opportunities once a week—Qwoted’s flexibility makes it easy for users to make the most of their time based on how they prefer to use the network.
Staff support: You’re assigned an account support person to help answer any questions that may come up. Their contact information is clearly visible on your dashboard, and the Qwoted team responds quickly to chat messages and phone calls.
Why we prefer Qwoted to HARO
Founded in 2008, HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, is another popular platform for journalists to find expert sources. Cision acquired HARO a few years later, and the platform was the standard for many years with little to no competition. This lack of competition allowed Cision to be fairly complacent about supporting HARO. While Cision eventually shut down HARO in 2024, they sold the rights to it in 2025 to Brett Farmiloe, the owner of little-known Featured–a sourcing site for lesser-known outlets.
HARO: An updated copyright and email-only announcements
HARO’s interface got a slight refresh under its new ownership, with the homepage proclaiming “HARO is back.” Copyrights are updated from 2015 to 2025. However, the core experience is the same and it’s still not what we’d call user-friendly.
There’s no way to view requests online as the old Cision/Connectivity web portal is gone. Instead, HARO just sends reporter queries in thrice-daily emails that look just like Source of Sources (SOS). Since SOS’s founder Peter Shankerman was the guy who founded (and then sold) HARO, this isn’t surprising. And, just like SOS, Haro runs ads at the top of its emails.
The site used to include the following text. While it’s not currently shown, it’s still the case:
“Sources will receive three emails a day, Monday through Friday at 5:35 a.m., 12:35 p.m. and 5:35 p.m. EST, with requests from reporters and media outlets worldwide. Scan the emails, and if you’re knowledgeable about any of the topics, answer the reporter directly through the anonymous @helpareporter.net email address provided at the beginning of the source request.”
Sources have three options:
- Sign up
- Create alerts
- Manage subscriptions
Clicking on “Manage subscriptions” prompts you to enter your email address which triggers an email token, bringing you to a page where you can choose which of the three “editions” you want (morning/noon/night).
Then you can choose up to two categories, including “All categories.” These have broadened a bit:
- Business and Finance
- General (new)
- Technology
- Travel
- Lifestyle and Entertainment (was Lifestyle and Fitness)
- Health and Pharma (new)
- Gift Bags
- Podcasts (new)
Clicking on “Create Alerts” inexplicably brings the user to the Featured website. If you’re not in-the-know this would be especially confusing.
HARO: Email-only pitching
One improvement to HARO is that most reporters and outlets are now named in the email digests. The July 28, 2025 “Afternoon Edition” included requests from Tidio, Scoop Business, Homes & Gardens, Leading Like a Lady, US News & World Report, and AI Baby Talks.
(Fyi, Tidio is a SaaS company, Scoop Business is in New Zealand, Leading Like a Lady is on Substack, and AI Baby Talks is on YouTube.)
Remember that there’s no way to see what you’ve sent in the past, so you’ll need to keep track of your HARO pitches on your own.
Insight from the journalist side of HARO
As an integrated marketing agency, Dogwood sometimes sources experts for our clients’ content marketing, and we have used both platforms. HARO is doing better at cleaning up its act, allowing journalists to select a “Filter for AI responses” check box (to which we wonder why it’s just not defaulted to checked, because what real journalist wouldn’t select it?). And, it now has some contributor and outlet requirements.
These include:
- Minimum domain authority of 20 or at least 10k monthly visitors.
- Podcasts only hosted on a company’s website not accepted.
- Medium & Substack blogs must have at least 5k subscribers
- Queries must never require pre-recorded video
- Student reporters may submit if part of an accredited journalism program with faculty endorsement.
Based on discussions with other industry professionals, we know the following to be true for other writers and journalists as well.
HARO pitches are more spammy than Qwoted’s, often providing low-quality AI-generated responses. And, because of the volume of people who receive HARO’s emails, the volume of responses is ridiculous.
For one request, “Favorite tools for starting an e-commerce business,” we sought responses from direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce companies in business for at least 18 months.
We received 76 responses; more than half were from marketing and SEO agencies, a quarter were not DTC e-commerce companies, and many of the remaining were fake accounts looking to build domains to sell. Filtering through so many junk responses to find the few valid ones takes valuable time. It’s no wonder quality journalists are leaving HARO.
Qwoted’s basic, free plan
Some people still use HARO because even at the basic/free level, pitches are unlimited.
Qwoted’s basic plan provides:
- Access to the request database
- Two pitches a month (New users get three bonus pitches)
- Access to free requests, the media database, and the job board
- The ability to DM reporters
- Real-time alerts—this gives you time to get your source’s response written and approved by the expert once the two-hour delay ends.
- Unlimited source profiles in the expert database—if one of your experts fits the need, reporters can reach out to you directly, and often a pitch credit isn’t necessary to respond.
The pesky side of Qwoted’s free plan
If you have great experts who can weigh in on many requests, you may need more than two pitches a month. And there’s a two-hour delay, which can be frustrating when you have a great response and want to be one of the first respondents to a top-tier request.
We recommend you test the waters first to see how quickly you use your pitches before signing up for a $99 “pro” plan. Once you determine an upgrade may be beneficial, you’ll gain access to:
- Unlimited pitches
- No response delay
- Pitch intelligence (access to who else has pitched the request)
- Profile view alerts
- An events & awards database
- …and more
The Qwoted team is updating and improving the network and platform monthly. We encourage you to check it out to see everything they’ve added to it.
Time, time, time…and thoughtfulness
It’s early days for HARO’s 2025 relaunch, so the jury is still out on whether it can reclaim its former glory. Initial reactions in the PR and journalism community have been a mix of excitement and caution. No matter which platform you select, both Qwoted and HARO users benefit most from an investment of time. Get to know the platforms, and more importantly, develop a strategic messaging document to position your leadership as trusted advisors and expert sources.
Our bottom-line recommendation
Ultimately, we recommend Qwoted. It’s a network that has a wide variety of outlets, podcasts, newsletters, and video opportunities. With an average of ~200 journalist requests per day (and sometimes close to 400 requests), there’s a lot to work with. HARO, though improved, is still an email digest with about 20 ho-hum requests.
For transparency, the Dogwood team does work closely with Qwoted as it’s one of our clients. But, if we didn’t 100% back it, we just wouldn’t publish an article like this.
